Today's Letters to the Editor from readers cover topics including the new hospital in Dunedin and a changing Green Party.
Ignoring progress and favouring one’s rhetoric
Christopher Luxon (ODT 3.5.25) hasn’t noticed a large partly finished building plus a huge field of piles ready for the next important building has been sitting waiting for the National government to finish.
The Labour Party was responsible for this: so far National has stopped everything, leaving hundreds of tradies hanging. The National Party had no intention of quickly getting this major project done.
Mr Luxon was hanging out with Farra Engineering, a long-standing and successful Dunedin company in its own right. He should have been standing in the empty space where a hospital should be, to reflect how badly this government has done so far.
Billions to landlords, tax cuts for the wealthy: where is the money for an underfunded public health system?
Mary Robertson
Dunedin
Either or
Which do you believe? That “six years of a Labour government... didn’t deliver a single thing for... the new hospital” and National is going to deliver an “awesome hospital”? (Christopher Luxon)
Or that the new outpatient building is there for all to see and on track for completion next year, and, if the coalition government had not stopped all work on the inpatient building in 2024, it too would be rising out of the ground?
Months after Simeon Brown’s announcement that the inpatient building would go ahead there has been no visible progress – only a constant dribble of proposed cuts.
Does Christopher Luxon think that repeating a lie over and over will make people believe it is true?
Gio Angelo
Belleknowes
Courage in design
Simeon Brown and, oddly, our mayor Jules Radich have no worries about the reduction in number of ICU beds. They know something we don't, something we haven't been told yet.
I have been there, in the current hospital, and I have worked it out. The teams of consultants who have used up the funds before so much as a sticky plaster has been applied in the new hospital didn't merely cut the wards, beds, staff space and facilities. They came up with a courageous design alteration to fit all purposes: quadrupling the width of all corridors.
K. Nordal Stene
Dunedin
Change feet
I like our mayor, he is different, but I am increasingly frustrated at his ability to open his mouth to change feet, the latest being the issue of ICU beds. Someone should tell him, to get an informed decision you don't talk to the bean counters but those at the coal face, i.e. doctors and nurses.
Graham Bulman
Roslyn
Not the messiahs, they are naughty children
Sadly, the Greens are no longer a party championing the environment and fighting to save us from the wanton destruction of the planet where we live. Which is what I would have thought was their primary reason for being, being Green. Instead they seem to have become a party of angry young individuals fighting for social justice for people of genders newly found, for the rights of peoples already being fought for in other quarters.
I wish Forest and Bird would put forward a political platform. They realise the need for real and proper environmental planning.
Since the sad demise of Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons, and latterly the totally wrongful laceration of James Shaw, it would seem that the Green Party has as much environmental planning as do my gumboots and as much care for the planet as my big toe.
Pete Jenkins
Galloway
Know your limits
In the road code there is a phrase “drive to the conditions’’. If there is an 80kmh limit, the conditions, be it weather, congestion etc, may mean it is inadvisable to drive at 80kmh. This rule can be applied outside schools, where sometimes I drive between 0 and 10kmh. However, at midnight I suggest it is safe to drive at 50kmh.
Alan Paterson
North East Valley
Address Letters to the Editor to: Otago Daily Times, PO Box 517, 52-56 Lower Stuart St, Dunedin. Email: editor@odt.co.nz
